It depends on the industry. When all the workers need to be working at the same time, the lunch break thing makes sense. For other industries (like programming)

It depends on the industry. When all the workers need to be working at the same time, the lunch break thing makes sense. For other industries (like programming), it doesn't matter if your coworkers are on break, you can keep working. I'm actually in this position, because I work remotely and only overlap a couple of hours with some team members. For health care, there exists individual plans. So, the employer can choose to offer that to non-members if they think it's worth it. The employer could also have a standard non-union benefit package if the company had enough non-union employees. Or, it could choose not to offer health insurance (or any other benefit it offered to the union). I don't agree that seeing your union colleagues get a benefit means that an individual negotiator be more likely to get a benefit. This knowledge does reveal that the employer is willing to give that benefit to the union. But, the union has the weight of it's members to extract that benefit. The non-member has only their individual contribution. So it depends on the individual's value to the business versus the union members' value. I suspect that there would still be a strong incentive to bargain collectively in jobs where an employee is easily replaced. These workers would see that they can get better compensation by banding together than going it alone. Meanwhile, it would basically not be feasible to unionize in areas where there is a significant difference in the productivity of individual employees. Most programming falls into this category in my opinion. More broadly, I think you've kinda missed my position a bit. I'm thinking about freedom of association as a negative right (as in "government can't force you to {x}"). So, if that right was interpreted the way I would like it to be, it doesn't really matter what the actual outcome is. It shouldn't be legal to force a non-member to associate with a union (unless the employer chooses to contract exclusively with that union). Obviously, you're arguing that my interpretation is not desirable b/c it would cause a free-rider problem (which I don't think is as strong of a possibility as you do).